The death of a loved one. It’s the least funny thing in the world, right? Try telling that to Sam Morrison, who has made a show about his bereavement journey since losing his partner to Covid in 2021. Sugar Daddy, already well received in New York and in London this week, is a wonderfully intimate offering from the 28-year-old that stints neither on big laughs, nor on honesty about Morrison’s grief. It’s a case study in the leaps comedy has taken, and continues to take, into territory that until recently most professional jokers would have considered out of bounds.
Morrison’s show is no outlier, as a piece in the New York Times makes clear: there is a rash of standup shows about grief. Why so? Consider it the logical endpoint – or latest stage – of the process that has seen comedy, growing in confidence as an artform, address itself over the last decade to ever less comical subject matter. All those shows about cancer, mental ill health and trauma; the dead-dad shows, supposedly so common as to become a cliche? They were the gateway. Now comics are handling the hard stuff: raw, recent, real-world bereavement.
They know, these comics, that “standup traumedy” is all the rage. They also know it’s not necessarily big box office: the Venn diagram is slender between audiences up for a laugh and audiences wishing to engage with death and loss. Morrison has a fun routine about this, a sarcastic eruption at the idea that his grief show might be some kind of careerist manoeuvre. Maybe it’s time to stop implying that comics who make “dead dad shows” are doing so cynically. Maybe we accept that for a healthy artform – even one that stands or falls on making you laugh – no subject is out of bounds, least of all the one to which artists have been drawn since time immemorial. The terminal subject, the infinite mystery: the end.
That’s how Morrison justifies making a show about his partner Jonathan’s death. There is, he tells us, no reckoning with or rationalising that loss. He can’t make sense of it – but he can make jokes of it. And to do so is cathartic. It also, in a way, brings the dead back to life: when Morrison speaks about his partner, he lights up. Jonathan was his big bear of a better half and Morrison leaves us in no doubt this is a quality to appreciate. The show opens with a wickedly well-argued paean to blubber over bone, to the virtues of outsized bodies. Why, marvels Morrison, do we valorise toning and the accrual of muscle? – for which there is (he illustrates, with ironic examples) little practical use in our 21st-century lives.
That set-piece is one among several that could stand alone, independently of Morrison’s grief show – but which enrich the show, by relieving its tension, and (in this instance) fleshing out the picture of the relationship at its heart. There’s more of that, plenty of it cheerfully lubricious: in its battle against Thanatos, Morrison declares strongly for Eros tonight. Two anecdotes, meanwhile, give the show its anchor points, as Morrison flits back and forward in time across the span of his relationship. One finds him resisting a mugging, because were he to relinquish his phone, he would lose his only photos of Jonathan. Another finds him assaulted by gulls on a beach when he tries to eat “gay little raisins” to top up his blood sugar – drained by the constant crying.
But for all that Morrison self-identifies as an “anxious, asthmatic, gay, diabetic Jew”, what is striking about the show is how un-anxious it is in performance. Morrison delivers it in a mode that is all his own: conversational, contemplative and intensely present. It feels safe, which is important for a show about grief: you don’t want to feel the performer is emotionally at risk. But it does feel too as if Morrison is still living this, feeling his way through the material performance by performance, trying to work out what it represents (is it glib? Is it triumph over adversity?), savouring the unusual feeling when the balm of laughter is applied to an open wound. It’s a fantastic show, that made me eager to see what Morrison does next, and lays respectfully to rest any suggestion that death and grieving might be beyond comedy’s reach.
• At Soho theatre, London, until 20 May.
